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Here, Let Me Give Your Career a Try.
New York residents may remember an ostentatious and obnoxious ad campaign around 1997 for an artist calling himself Amano. In a move normally used by fashion retailers, entire subway cars were plastered with ads for his first solo show in New York. Over amorphous backgrounds hovered pretentious and faux-mystical slogans: "paint your lunch/THINK LIKE AMANO," "mistrust certain flowers/THINK LIKE AMANO," "refuse to wear your glasses/THINK LIKE AMANO," and so forth. I'm not sure where the show was, but the campaign had "West Broadway" written all over it. I don't know anyone who saw the exhibit. [Update: a friend saw it and said it was in the Puck Building.]
Well, Amano's back, and now he's at Leo Koenig, which shows a number of good artists (Jeff Elrod, Lisa Ruyter, Michael Phelan, etc). Turns out he's a Japanese animation guy making a career change, or trying to, anyway. The work is fine--a kind of Asian Pop version of the flat affectless modernist-style painting that is becoming Koenig's specialty--but the claims the press release makes for his career are a bit of a stretch: that he is "a creator" of Speed Racer and Final Fantasy, and that he "creat[ed] such characters as Hutch the Honeybee, Tekkaman, and G-Force."
Most of that isn't true, but the New York Times bought the hype and stretched it even further. Here's today's listing:
"YOSHITAKA AMANO, Leo Koenig, 249 Centre Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 334-9255 (through Aug. 3). A superstar of Japanese anime, Mr. Amano is the creator of "Speed Racer," "G-Force" and "Final Fantasy." This show features glossy, cartoon portraits of androgynous young action heroes and a near mural-size painting crammed with every "Final Fantasy" character. Best is a series of brush and ink paintings on paper, each representing a different emotionally excited human eye (Johnson)." [And suggesting an un-arty Raymond Pettibon, I might add.]
Here are the slightly less inflated facts of Amano's career. According to Clements & McCarthy's Anime Encyclopedia, he was a teenage prodigy who lent his design talents to many major anime productions (both film and TV), beginning in the late '60s/early'70s. His first job was with Tatsunoko Productions, at age fifteen. He may very well have worked on Speed Racer, but is not listed in the encyclopedia as one of the series' creators. G-Force first aired in 1972, but according to Clements and McCarthy, only the 1979 Japanese sequel Gatchaman II featured Amano's design work. Hutch the Honeybee premiered in 1970, but Amano did design work solely on the 1974 followup series, called New Hutch. The encyclopedia's entry for Final Fantasy discusses an anime based loosely on the popular game, and the barely-related 2001 film, but Amano isn't mentioned in connection with either (in all likelihood he only worked on the game). Tekkaman, 1975, is actually the only anime cited by the gallery for which Amano was the primary designer, according to this fairly exhaustive reference work.
None of this should matter: Amano's work will stand or fall based on what he's doing now, in the West, and not on his previous career in another artistic ecosystem. Pumping up the resume is an attempt to create mystique for the work--the myth of the genius, from the mysterious East, and all that (not to mention tapping into boomer/Gen X kid's-show nostalgia). We'd be a lot better served by understanding, first, what makes good anime (what role does the designer play, exactly, as distinguished from the director, the writer, or the animator?), and second, how does work produced in that genre transcend its context to speak to the Western gallery world? There's a lot of confusion out there right now: Takashi Murakami, for example, has endeared himself to American curators by appropriating anime and other Japanese design conventions; his is a highly commercial enterprise sold as "Japanese contemporary art," even though Japan itself has no real tradition of the solitary, metacritical, artist. At least Amano has roots in a legitimate cultural sweatshop. Just a little of that is necessary to give his work street cred, though--he doesn't have to be the Japanese Walt Disney.
Update: For the Lisa Ruyter referred to in this post see Francis Ruyter.